Surf the Mind

Archive for December, 2008

If you’re thinking of monetizing your blog by using affiliate programs, link cloaking is something that you probably won’t think of instantly. After a while, you’ll realize that your visitors can avoid your affiliate link, or replace it with their own, very easily, thereby robbing you of those much-needed bucks, and this is not a good thing.

Cloaking your links won’t completely eliminate this problem, but it will keep your visitors from immediately realizing you’re sending them off to a Clickbank (or other affiliate marketplace) link.

For most sites, I’m a big fan of GoTryThis. It serves me very well as a link cloaker, with the added benefit of embedding cookies, great stats, split testing, and other neat tricks.

However, for WordPress sites that will either be flipped, or that I want to keep separate from my main sites, the free Link Cloaking Plugin is a brilliant choice.

Read the rest of this entry »

If your blog is news-oriented, this isn’t for you. However, if your blog contains a lot of evergreen articles and how-to information, you should definitely take a look at the Reposter WordPress Plugin. Reposter will take the articles from a category you select (ideal if you’ve got a ‘tutorials’ section!) and re-publish your old articles on a schedule you supply.

It’s pretty simple to use. Once you’ve activated the plugin, click on Settings to see the Reposter tag. From there you’ll get an administration screen with all your categories listed, and options beside each one.

Reposter doesn’t change the URL of the post, so your old links and search engine links will remain. It does update the post date and re-ping the article, so you get fresh new traffic from last year’s work.

A great idea to drive traffic back to brilliant posts of the past.